Tong, Lydia
Over 130 interviews with Chinese Canadian women were conducted for the book Jin Guo: Voices of Chinese Canadian Women. Produced in 1992 by the Women’s Book Committee of the Chinese Canadian National Council, Jin Guo was intended to fill the gap in historical accounts of Chinese Canadian women’s history. Researchers traveled across Canada to interview Chinese Canadian women of various ages and backgrounds. The book’s authors, Amy Go, Winnie Ng, Dora Nipp, Julia Tao, Terry Woo and May Yee, organized the book around themes and patterns that emerged across multiple interviews – feelings of isolation and culture shock upon arrival in Canada, memories of parent-child relationships, the importance of education, the working lives of women, discrimination, cultural identity, marriage and dating, family life, perspectives on aging and retirement, and examples community activism. The interviews conducted for this project are stored at the Multicultural History Society of Ontario’s archives. This collections database includes a large cross-section of interviews conducted for Jin Guo – in English, Cantonese and Mandarin.
In this interview Lydia Tong discusses her immigration from Hong Kong, and her life in Canada.
Lydia grew up in a working class family. Although her father was a teacher and valued education, he discouraged her from going to university and refused to pay for tuition. In order to pay for her education, Lydia took on many jobs. Through a colleague of hers, she met her future husband, Josh. At the time, Josh had mostly been working overseas. They gradually got to know each other through exchanging letters and eventually fell in love. They decided to go to Washington State University together where Lydia studied home economics. Upon graduation, Lydia and Josh returned to Hong Kong and got married. In 1978, shortly after their first child was born, they moved to St. John’s, Newfoundland. Lydia stayed at home to raise her son, while running a business on the side as a seamstress.
Adjusting to mainstream Canadian life was difficult. Coming from a big city, she was unaccustomed to the manual labour required to maintain a home, such as gardening and fence building. She had an active social life within the Chinese community. She belonged to dance groups and attended church. She also became a Chinese teacher at her local community group.
While she had made some close Chinese friends, Lydia wishes that she had been more involved with her English speaking Canadian neighbours. Coming to Canada with financial worries and a newborn left her little time to learn enough English to socialize comfortably. The cultural barrier also made it difficult to get close to them.
Lydia doesn’t recall being discriminated against, but feels self-conscious of the image she projects. She feels as though Chinese Canadians have to work twice as hard to get noticed at the workplace and if they do something wrong, that behaviour becomes an ethnic stereotype.
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